the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the
common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy,
stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with
a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the
sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human.

Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the
image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a
Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so
described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and
Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common
assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and
parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,
the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious
cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and
more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a
geometrically increasing proportion.

This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the
qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself
are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great
pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of
the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from
his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality
of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process
by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and
the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action
of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal
begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.